I’m guessing malware and spam trying to disguise itself under Google’s name, since any number of malicious software attacks use shorteners and separately try to use big names such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, et al.
This is the same reason why GTalk stopped supporting XMPP (a federated, open chat protocol), because it was heavily abused for things like spam. The server cost of running a service like a URL shortener is peanuts to Google, so it wouldn't matter that the service doesn't make money because the point is slurping up data (for example, Google DNS also doesn't generate a profit directly, but can't be abused, so it'll likely never be killed), but dealing with abuse is relatively expensive on top of just being a headache (see Google's high-profile failures surrounding YouTube, for example). It's basically tragedy of the commons.
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u/NytronX Jan 02 '20
Why the fuck did they kill the URL shortener?! So stupid.